The Coping Classes

It's been an upsy-downsy busy week, writing, spearing fish, writing, re-doing our drivers licences, writing, talking to an Australian agent about a non-fiction book, writing, talking to someone about an e-book seminar, writing, long e-mails to Misty and Eric about the latest book, writing etc... your life does become interwoven with your writing. I'm never too sure whether it would be better to have a dull non-chaotic unworried life (and I have had little pieces of that... somewhere down the line) and escape into an exciting writing bit, without the disturbance, or if the disturbance feeds back into it. On the whole I could part with the 'worry' aspect, and being able to order less chaos when the pressure is on... would be nice. But that's not going to happen so we deal with it.

The big question is just how you deal with it. If you want to be a career writer, you cannot let it overwhelm you. You have to evolve mechanisms of coping and continuing. For instance I KNOW my unhappiness leaks into my writing. My state of mind when writing MUCH FALL OF BLOOD - and dealing with having to leave my country and the way that tore at me, and my mum's death, was not a good mental place to be. Add that to the uncertainty in the industry and the fact that I would have to leave my comfort zone - and risk my family - canine, feline and human was tougher than I was really up to. But I could not stop writing to get past it, because that's my income. So: - coping strategies - firstly I was even more disciplined than normal about daily wordcount - I dropped the numbers a bit, out of reality, but did not stop. Secondly - it was going to leak so why not make it a factor in the book, make the book more powerful by writing about those things. I suppose aspects of what loyalty and indeed patriotism mean are strong recurring (non-PC) themes in my work. MUCH FALL OF BLOOD is probably more about these things than any other book I've written - but I tried to use this as building blocks, not just a catharsis (who the hell wants your catharis or your misery? but they might want your solutions and your passion)and kept the story aspect strong.

I won't know - until the reader-feedback starts - if I got it right.
But how do you do it?
What strategies do you have for working past real life intervening and influencing?